SINGAPORE : One is an R21-rated arthouse movie which trotted off with seven Golden Horse Awards last weekend. The other is a fluffy Disney picture that rehashes well known fairy tale characters.

They may be as different as night and day. But look closely at Lust, Caution and Enchanted, both still playing in cinemas here, and you'll see that there's much in common than meets the eye: The theme of reel intruding on real.

In Lust, Caution, set in Shanghai during the Second World War, mainland Chinese actress Tang Wei plays a young actress who plays the role of her life: As a tai tai out to seduce a traitor (played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai).

As the game of intrigue and torrid sex gets underway, she finds herself increasingly unable to sieve fiction from fact.

In a similar but somewhat frivolous vein is Enchanted, about cartoon storybook characters crossing the threshold into real life — with comic results.

These two titles are but the latest in a wave of such stories spanning different genres.

Last year, for instance, there was the horror flick, Stay Alive, in which characters whose videogame avatars are killed end up dying gruesome deaths.

In the big-budget adventure-fantasy, Night at the Museum, exhibits spring into life in the natural history museum after closing hours.

Perhaps these stories are told as a reaction to the excesses of reality TV.

Or perhaps they reflect the zeitgeist of our times when rumours in chat rooms and hearsay in blogs are passed off as facts.

But it's certainly not just an idle debate but comes loaded with ethical considerations.

For when fact gets this close to fiction or fiction to fact, how do you draw the line?

Take, for instance, some of the shenanigans in Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world, launched in 2003, where users (or "Residents") can interact with one another through their avatars.

Legal experts are now cracking their heads over whether an avatar raping another constitutes an actual crime. Belgian police have, in fact, opened a case file on one such complaint.

And what about the curious case of writer James Frey, who admitted last year that A Million Little Pieces, supposedly a memoir about his life as a junkie and would-be drug dealer and was once named as an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection, was partly made up?

Even journalists are occasionally tempted to play fast and loose with the facts.

For example, star reporters such as USA Today's Jack Kelley, The New Republic's Stephen Glass (the inspiration for the 2003 film, Shattered Glass) and The New York Times' Jayson Blair sullied their respected publications' reputations when they confessed to fabricating stories.

But that's not stopping some artists from pushing the envelope.

In Death of a President (2006), for instance, filmmaker Gabriel Range created what appeared to be a documentary about the assassination of US President George W Bush — by splicing real video images with computer-generated footage.

It immediately calls to mind what director Robert Zemeckis had done in the six-Oscar-winner, Forrest Gump (1994), when he digitally made actor Tom Hanks shake hands with the late President John F Kennedy.

The problem with authenticity has now become a real issue. Seeing, unfortunately, is no longer believing. - TODAY/fa